On Monday night, April 1, The Huntington will host a panel discussion devoted to the web-based digital exhibition “Form and Landscape: Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Basin, 1940–1990.” That new exhibition is part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. and is slated to … Continue reading
Category Archives: Lectures
An Economic Historian Plays with Art History
Steve Hindle, the W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at The Huntington, will present a lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday evening, March 6, in Friends’ Hall. His subject: The economic history of 18th-century rural England. Here he explains how he arrived at a visual representation of that story. … Continue reading
A Library of Last Resort
Henry Edwards Huntington was born on this day in 1850, which makes today Founder’s Day at The Huntington. You can mark the occasion by downloading last week’s Founder’s Day talk by David Zeidberg, the Avery Director of the Library. Zeidberg’s lecture is the comprehensive answer to one of the most … Continue reading
Historical Moments Past and Present
Today Barack Obama will be sworn in for his second term as president of the United States, although the public ceremony and inaugural speech won’t take place until Monday. In today’s New York Times, historian Ronald C. White Jr. explains why second inaugural addresses often fall flat, albeit with one … Continue reading
AUDIO | The Work of Death
Historian Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University and author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, spoke at The Huntington last night about Ric Burns’ adaptation of her book into the new PBS documentary “Death and the Civil War.” You can download her talk from The … Continue reading
AUDIO | Witches of Research
If you missed David Hall’s standing-room-only lecture last month about witches, you can now download it from The Huntington’s site on iTunes U. Hall’s talk was titled “Witch-Hunting and the Sadness of Everyday Life: An Alternative Perspective on Early New England.” He is professor of New England Church History at … Continue reading
LECTURES | Thinking About that Other Civil War
Lost in sesquicentennial commemorations of various Civil War anniversaries is the fact that we are in the thick of the bicentennial year of one of America’s other Civil Wars—the War of 1812. Or at least that’s how Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Alan Taylor sees it. Taylor wrote about the lesser celebrated … Continue reading
LECTURES | An Intellectual Feast
Check out what’s coming up in the way of conferences and lectures this fall at The Huntington. Many visitors might not know about the array of offerings, but every year, as the academic year gets under way, The Huntington bustles with an array of rich intellectual events that are free … Continue reading
LECTURES | Shedding New Light on Old Manuscripts
With their high-tech lighting equipment and software, Greg Bearman and Ken Boydston can reveal hidden text in old, darkened manuscripts. Called spectral imaging (or sometimes multi-spectral imaging), the technique bounces different wavelengths of light off objects to increase the contrast between ink and parchment, rendering the invisible visible. “Instead of … Continue reading
LECTURES | Bird by Bird
If you consider yourself an amateur birdwatcher, you owe a debt to one of the first professional birders, Robert Ridgway (1850-1929), the Smithsonian’s first curator of birds. Huntington curator Daniel Lewis hopes his new book, The Feathery Tribe: Robert Ridgway and the Modern Study of Birds, will help restore the … Continue reading